TOP 5 BOOKS EVER.............?

[enprovence]

Desperate for some new reading matter, what are you TOP 5 BOOKS EVER?

Will rack my brains and add mine too..........

Trainspotting - Irvin Welsh
A secret History - Donna Tartt
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Notes on A Scandal - Zoe Heller
Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck

hey mine have mostly been said by others as I am a great Austen fan. (not so much Brontes I hated Wuthering Heights, but Jane Eyre wasn't so bad - but you can't beat Austen for wit) anyways just for those who also love Austen I read a book recently called "The Man Who Loved Austen" it was a totally fictional story about Darcy being a real man who Jane met. Its a bit out there but the fun of it is so Austen, I reckon she would have liked it.

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Atonement - Ian McEwen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

V. difficult to chose just 5 but casting my eye over my bookshelves, I would say:

Music & Silence - Rose Tremain
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
Waterland - Graham Swift

And Adrian Mole

Always Smiling - have you read P&P and Zombies yet? I totally recommend it!

That's hard, but tonights faves would have to be:
A Prayer for Owen Meaney
To Kill a mockingbird
Persuasion
Captain Corellis Mandolin
Goodnight Mister Tom

Wuthering Heights
Atonement
Crime & Punishment
War & Peace
Anna Karenina

To Kill A Mockingbird (bell...echo...)
East of Eden
Seven Types of Ambiguity
Wuthering Heights
Memoirs of a Geisha

(have to put a nod to The Old Man and the Sea - read it as a child at 8 or 9, reread at least twice a year since, it's like my security blanket)

none of these are in order as the picking 5 was hard enough - don't ask me to rate them even further

Frankenstin
Atonement
VAnity Fair
Howard's End
Sense & Sensibility

My crap top 5 reads:
Polo
Eclipse
New Moon
Flower's In The Attic
Diary of Adrian Mole

Tough one, but today I'm veering towards ...

1984 - George Orwell

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

Kai Lung's Golden Hours - Ernest Bramah

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

I mean ...

Tough one, but today I'm veering towards ...

1984 - George Orwell

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

Kai Lung's Golden Hours Ernest Bramah Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Oh yes thanks- had forgotten how much I enjoyed Memoirs of a geisha!

No particular order

The English Patient
The Poisonwood Bible
The Blind Assassin
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Death and Life of Charlie St Cloud

East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
Silk - Alessandro Baricco
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

Very hard though.

Crap books:

Shadowmancer by GP Taylor
Dan Brown
Stephanie Meyer
Judy Collins' autobiography
My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

The Cornish Trilogy, Robertson Davies (or maybe The Deptford Trilogy)
Not Wanted on the Voyage, Timothy Findley
Memoirs of Hadrian, Margarite Yourcenar
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Black Sheep, Balzac

found this thread while looking for something else and couldn't help throwing my 5 cents in... or at least 5 random favourite books....Its more difficult than I thought it would be...

The Stand- Stephen King
The Vampire Lestat- Anne Rice
American Gods- Neil Gaiman
A Thousant Words for Stranger- Julie E. Czerneda
Illusion-Paula Volsky

Jane Eyre - Bronte
The Diviners - Margaret Laurence
The Handmaid Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Remains of the day - Ishiguro

Recent fab reads though:

American Wife - Curtis Sittenfield
The Various Flavours of Coffee - Antony Capella
The hour I first believed - Wally Lamb

My top 5:

The secret history by Donna Tart
Time Travelers wife by Audrey Niffeniger
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davis
The secret Mandarin by Sara Sheridan

Some of my favourites:

Gone with the Wind
Time Traveler's Wife
A Widow for One Year
Jane Eyre
Atonement

So hard to choose!

The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

A very difficult choice. The Great Gatsby was the first book which opened up literature to me.

A Prayer for Owen Meany just made me laugh more than any other book.

Crime and Punishment in my view is just brilliant.

A Fine Balance swept me away.

The Sea, The Sea had me spell bound from the first page until the last.

A Secret History - Donna Tartt
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez
Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
Homestead - Rosina Lippi
The Other Side of the Bridge - Mary Lawson

I actually really loved the CJ Sansom books - they're a series about a kind of detective called Shardlake around the time of Henry VIII (I know...but they're a great read!)

In addition to those mentioned I liked Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulkes. Personally I preferred this to Birdsong.

Also; Middlemarch and others by George Elliot;

Most books by Anita Shreve (eg The Pilot's Wife), John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman) and Olivia Manning (Balkan and Levant Trilogies.

Purple Hibiscus - can't remember author she also wrote One Half of a Yellow Sun.

Great Expectations

The Stand - Stephen King

Portrait of Dorian Gray

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck.

The Stand.

Thousand Splendid Suns.

Time Travellers Wife.

Of Mice and Men.

19 Minutes.

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
How I Paid For College - Marc Acito
Pride and Prejudiced - Jane Austen
Vesuvius Club - Mark Gatiss
Cater in the Rye - JD Salinger